Forecasting with Resource Capacity

March 26, 2017 by Nic Widhalm

The ability to forecast when you have capacity to take on additional work is a vital part of a good project management system. In this week’s two-minute video, the team discusses how you can use Cloud Coach Resource Capacity to ensure you have the proper work types available to take on additional projects.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hello everyone, Nic here from Cloud Coach, and today we’re going to look at how you can use resource capacity to
forecast when you can take on additional projects.

Let’s start here in our Salesforce org. We’re on our projects tab right now, but we want to look at our capacity so we’re going to switch over by clicking here to Resource Capacity. This is going to take us into a reporting screen where we can look at our capacity over the next six months, days, or weeks. So here at the top you can see we have a number of filtering options where you can pick the start date or can choose if you want to look at capacity by days weeks or months. You can also choose which work types you want to see by typing them right into here, and you can see how this graph changes. Let’s go ahead and get rid of Developer for right now and just look at just these folks here.

Okay, so the graph gives us a mouse over that lets us see here in April that our business analysts are forty four percent at capacity. If we move over into Maine they’re almost at full capacity so we probably can’t take on any projects there. But if we move over into July we can see that now they’re once again under one hundred percent capacity, and we could probably afford to take on more projects at this point.

And if you want to see where those hours are coming from we can look at the work types right down here that we’ve chosen; we can crack them open, for example business analysts, and let’s click down here and we can see that in March they’re over capacity at two hundred thirty one percent. If we want to know where those hours are coming from, well, they’re all right now coming from allocations. If we click into allocations we can see a graph that once again shows us we’re over capacity. Where those hours are coming from is the projects, and I can crack them open and right there are the tasks. I can also see if there are any resource requests against them; both resource requests that are approved, or, if I click this button right here I can see any pending resource requests. So, we can see how that graph changes once again, and I can click into it and the green bar shows me these hours are coming from requests
rather than specific tasks. I can crack open these pending and approve requests and dig a little bit deeper, if I want, and go into the actual resource requests and see what’s happening.

So, a really easy way you can use resource capacity to forecast your projects and see when you have the work capacity to be able to take on additional work. Thanks for joining today, and make sure to come back next week for another two-minute video. Thanks everyone.